Lenardo's Legacy

The team set up its base in a hotel after recovering its equipment and immediately departed toward Brescia, where the painting was held in a local bank caveau. Although the only one speaking the country language was Damocle, it was decided that a team (Damocle, Kain and Sion) would infiltrate the Bank. However, probably due to the collusion between one of the bank employed and Tyron itself, as soon as the team aquired the painting and prepared to leave the bank, a Tyron strike team presented itself at the bank door. While the team prepared for a siege barricading behind the bank door, Tyron broke the stall by retreating in their vans and having the police take up their place; the idea was to have the Cobras arrested and to retrieve the treasure by the police hands. However, thanks to the interventions of the second squad waiting outside the building, the siege was broken and the team ran for a long and difficult escape. After being scattered accross the city, the squad could, albeit not easyly, rally itself and escape Tyron first assault wave.

The first line of investigation was searching for an expert to examine a printed copy of Leonardo's work, but this proved just a little bit more than futile. We aquired only some kind of guessing that the expert could make, relying on a speculative theory about the work which claimed to have identified the place where it was drawn. It was thus decided to contact the owner of the land where such place still stood; the man was a rich businessman, whom we could not meet, living in middle Italy. However, we were asked to stay in his coutry house while waiting for his handyman to contact us. When this time came, we were easyly granted permission to access the old Villa laying in the nearby woods, although nobody seemed to know that the place could be of culural significance. While waiting for the right time to approach this place, the team tried another procedure to aquire information, trying to steal Leonardo's Codex which was temporarly exposed in a local museum, however the plan was abandoned 'cause it was soon understood that the team lacked the stealth and infiltrtative ability needed to even try this approach.

Another point we surely won't forget is that one should not speak too much to people he doesn't know so well... In fact, our interest in the recently stolen painting probably alerted someone with akin interests and this in turn drawn unwanted attention. As the team was on its way to the abandoned manor where the painting should have been depicted, it was ambushed by a Tyron Strike Force. The ambush took place in the woods just surrounding the manor and it was like nothing we faced before. Although outnumbered and outarmed by the opposing force, the team could defeat its opponents, probably due to the fact that they were not prepared to face a Zooanthropic menace; however, this battle injured some team members quite a bit and during the confrontation the Team van got nearly destroyed. We nonetheless aquired access to both the manor and the suspect that the responsible for this attack could be laying in the only place where we spoke of visiting the manor: the Rich Man country house. Decided to deal with such problem later, the team found its way into the abandoned manor.

The manor apparently hold no clue to the solution of our mystery, however, investigation took a turn for the better when Damocle used his powers to speak to a mouse living there; through its help we came to know that an ancient crypt lied under the manor from unremembered time. Guided through a secret passage by the Rat Friend the team delved into the manor bowels and discovered some ancient tombs. Apparently, there were buried the bodies of the family who held the manor in ages past, who were also the family members of the model Leonardo used to depict the painting. They seemed to be involved in some political intrigue revolving around the death of the model herself: all we could understand was that maybe she held documents regarding Leonardo's painting of some significance to the Tyron faction and that she was killed to prevent any information leak. Retrieving some of Leonardo's rough sketches among the decaying "treasures" confirmed this point and we immediately passed to the study of these new data. Believing that the Rich Man Mansion could hold much more secrets, the team decided for an infiltration in the above mentioned residence, in the hope of uncovering a Tyron hideout. In order to provide the necessary distraction to get in, we teamed up with the rat tribe that helped us in the research, convincing them to rush into the house all at the same time to create the greatest chaos possible.

Although the plan seemed to have a sense, things went screwy right from the start; convinced that the rat invasion would hold the mansion security and attention at bay for some time, a couple of the team members entered the house with little care. This resulted in the first disaster: the room chosen as entry point was occupied by the Rich Man's son and his Piano teacher. Being civilian, it was no pain getting through them, they were stunned and tied and then put into a closet (this with really little care for the two of them, since there was an imminent rat invasion and surely they would not have been happy to find themselves tied and overrun by rats, NdAya); we then set to the exploration of the mansion. At this point, things started not making sense anymore: first of all, our incursion did not turn out any secret chamber or hideout (Like you could have been able to find such thing anyway, NdAya), moreover, something really strange happened (events absolutely indipendent from our will and action). The Rich Man handyman was brutally slain during the rat invasion, but it is highgly improbable that the rats could have done such a mess, moreover, the Rich Man son and his teacher too were nearly murdered. We found them, barely alive just outside the closet where we left them and so we decided to extract them to give them the first aid. During our escape, one of our members in Lupus form was seen by a bystander, this could well be the reason of the following complication; in fact, we later ascertained that the Rich Man was in fact a Tyron Sorcerer and surely the presence in his house of a very large wolf right in the middle of a rat invasion during which his son was kidnapped and his handyman slain, could very well have alerted him of a direct Zooanthropic hostility...

There was really little that could be understood from the data the team retrieved in the abandoned mansion, the only thing we could make out was that Leonardo invested quite a deal of time into the painting frame instead of putting his abilities at best in the painting itself... Meanwhile, we had to retrieve a doctor to help the dying child and his teacher; luckyly, we accomplished this mission quite hastly, but the puzzles still weren't over. The serious injuries that the boy sustained made him unconscious for much longer than his teacher who got up earlier. We tried to hide our mission from her, but the prolonged contact we were forced to keep with the subject made this efforts vain, she soon understood that we possessed the painting and were trying to solve some kind of mistery. One of these mysteries surely was tightly related to herself, but it turned out to be more complicated than we thought. The teacher seemed to know, although vaguely, that the man for whom she worked was able to perform miraculous deeds, she saw it herself once, when she descended into the mansion cellar and witnessed some kind of dark ritual, during which she clearly saw the Rch Man floating a couple of meters above the ground. This convinced us that the man surely was linked to Tyron and that he could have well been a true sorcerer, but we were not prepared for the next enigma: the teacher asserted the one who tried to kill her and the boy was none less than the Rich Man himself. The meaning of all this escaped even her understanding... however we had more pressing matters to solve: in fact we could understand that the painting frame could be disassembled to form some kind of puzzle that, once put back together in the right order, gave us some kind of written composition. With the help of the Piano teacher (the only one aside Damocle to understand Italian, but also the only one who could read Italian AND see...) we tried to puzzle out some kind of translation, but it was a futile attempt, it was written in an unknown language, perhaps the true ancient Zooanthropic tongue, since amidst the unintellegible words were present the well known Fythos Lusec Wecos Vinosec.

Willing to help us, the teacher proposed us the help of some friends of her living in Venice, one was an expert in Leonardo's studies, while others had connection to a local not so legal organization. While we refused the first one, we in the end accepted the second to refresh our weaponry and monetary resources. Such organization, decided to help us out of friendship toward the piano teacher and relieved us from the burden of rolling around with a wounded kid in our van by taking him to a safer place. We then set to the research of a missing link: it seemed that Leonardo resulted missing for a period of time in which there were no records of his activities, believing that he could have been developing the Tyron Drug project in that timespan, we tried to backtrack his travels and in the end, we received the just reward for our efforts. In a well hidden sewer (projected by Leonardo himself) we found a sealed passage which seemingly held some kind of bunker. There laid an ancient book, hidden away much carefully: it was nothing less than the accurated description (wrote by the Very hand of Leonardo) of his latest achievements... Thanks to the aid of the Italian teacher and the previously retrieved code (in the painting frame) we translated enough of the book to understand that it was just what we feared (or hoped for): the secret ritual that could morph a human into a Zooanthrope.

With the main objective completed, all was left to do was to terminate any Tyron follower. First f all, we got rid of the civilian teacher by turning her to her friends, so that they could take care of her, then we accorded with those very friends to have the Rich Man come out from his hideout, their guess was on using the son as a bait, but we preferred to keep that as a last option, knowing that the Rich Man could well be responsible for the child near death. We decided to lay a different bait in order to terminate a first wave of Tyron forces. The plan was like this: after taking care of one of their armed forces, they would have needed time to regroup and reorganize their forces, if we could press them into thinking that we were about to leave Italy, they would have had to play everything down to their last resort. If the Rich Man would not do that, and we would escape, Tyron would probably claim his head for his incompetence (after all he left a Zooanthropic Troop leave with Tyron most dreamed secret in their grasp...), so we trusted in the old chant "If you want something made well, do it by yourself" to have the mage himself show up. The plan worked in the end, maybe too well. We could eliminate the first wave of chasers, although we met some problems, and then we let slip some info away to alert the Tyron headquarter that we were about to leave; we then barricaded inside a little private airport out of town, filling it with traps and waiting for the main force arrival... And they did come. Strangely enough, the Rich Man tried to parley, he wanted his son back, he seemed to really believe that we had kidnapped him, however, the child was with us no more and, when it was clear we could not return his child, he launched a tremedous attack. Our first confrontation with a Sorcerer was quite traumatic and, were it not for the disorganization we caused, the place filled with traps and a lot of luck, we would have surely soccumbed to the Sorcerer Magical Powers. Although we were able to kill him and all the remaining forces, we were severly injured and Kain escaped death by an inch, surviving only thanks to a murderous rage that took him back from the brink of death where a Sorcerous Ligthing sent him...